Rate Confirmation in Trucking: Complete Guide to Reviewing & Signing Load Agreements

so what is a rate confirmation so the rate confirmation is basically an agreement between the

broker and your carrier which details the uh information about the shipment uh and the rate so as I've mentioned before

uh once you book the load and you confirm with your with the broker that you're interested and and you want to

book it um you know the broker will send you the rate confirmation and what you'll have to do is you want to make

sure you review the rate information and validate that all the information within the rate confirmation is aligned with

what you and the broker had agreed on on the phone and once you verified that

everything is correct uh you'll sign the ray confirmation using tools like Adobe um to sign the document or you can print

it out and sign it uh by hand and you just send that back to the uh broker and now you guys have a legal binding

document that says that your carrier is respons responsible for moving Freight point from point A to point B uh for the

greed amount rate So within the rate confirmations uh you want to make sure that you read any special notes or in

instructions um that your driver must be aware of uh before picking up the freight so examples can be things like a

broker might put in a late fee if the load is not dropped off on time and you want to make sure that's you know you

read this in the notes and if that's the case you want to inform your driver that if the load is not picked up on time or

dropped off on time there's going to be a late fee another thing that you might see on the rate confirmations is uh

things like uh verbiage about the proof of deliveries must be emailed within 48 hours and if not you know there'll be

deductions on the rate so you want to make sure you relay any of these important informations to your driver uh

after you know booking the freight so if there's any discrepancies uh within the rate confirmation

um you want to attend to them immediately with a broker and you want to make sure that the broker fixes these

issues on the rate confirmation um and sends you a revised rate confirmation you know you want to make sure that

you're not just uh agreeing with the fix on the phone you need it to be in writing so you need the rate

confirmation to be revised so for example if the pickup date is not um listed correctly on the rate

confirmation you know it's not what you agreed on when you were talking to the broker on the phone you want to make

sure that uh the broker knows this and you know fixes it and sends you the revised rate confirmation so now let me

show you uh some examples of what rate confirmations look like so I went ahead and pulled up a few rate confirmations

for us to go through now these are legitimate rate confirmations um and you know these are loads that we've actually

done in the past and I went ahead and redacted a few uh important information just to keep things uh private for our

carriers so we'll go ahead and start up from the top so you know you'll have the uh broker's information typically here

at the top and then you'll have your carriers information as well so this broker is PLS Logistics

services and you'll see um the the most common thing that you'll see on every right confirmation is a load ID number

so it's also referred to as load number it's just a number that basically you know um is used when when it's time to

invoice your broker they'll refer to this load number to pull pull it up in their system so for this broker they

have their load ID here on the top left corner they have also a shipment ID number and they have a Bill of Ling

number um and then here is the uh carrier contact information so this is going to be our carrier's information so

they their name do number contact information uh and then this is the PLS contact so this for the broker next

you'll have the shipment details so this is going to include the pickup number and a pickup number is basically the

number that your driver is going to provide to the shipper for them to pull it up uh in their system and know which

load the load on the truck so other things you'll have on the rate confirm on the rate confirmation is the weight

so you want to make sure that you know this weight is what your broker had told you initially when you're on the call

and then you'll have the equip equipment type necessary for this load so this is a dry van load so it says van here um so

this raycon has the miles uh and this is from you know shipper to receiver uh and then you know commodity uh so it seems

like here the commodity is not listed uh but we know that it's 23 pallets so next you'll have the stop details so this is

basically the origin and then destination so the origin you know you'll have your pickup uh number and

then any appointment numbers and typically this is the same thing appointment number pickup number it's

just you know written here twice it seems but you'll have the address of the shipper so this is where the load will

be picked up at and uh a contact information is typically provided for the shipper but in most cases uh Brokers

like to hide that information but you can find it if you Googled U the shipper name the numbers typically pop up next

you have the date in time for this load so this one is December 9th is when it's going to be picked up uh well when it's

been picked up so at 1,00 um that's the time for the pickup so it looks like there's no additional facility notes so

it's just empty here next you'll have the destination and the delivery number is typically the same thing as like the

pickup number um you know some some some receivers will ask for this uh some you know they just take your bill of leading

that your driver has and just look at the documents and they already know what that commodity is and where it's coming

from so this is the address for the receiver and then the appointment time so this receiver seems like it's uh the

load delivers on the 12th uh from 8 till um 3:30 so it seems like this is a first come first surf facility and there's no

appointment time for this load so we'll scroll down it looks like there's no additional um notes Here uh but this is

here is uh the special requirements for this load so this is PPE required so personal protection uh so you know it

says here that loads must be properly secured and sealed prior to departing um you know and this is kind

of the stuff that I was talking about earlier how you want to make sure you read through this and see if there's

anything important that your driver must know about so here it says um notify a brok ER prior to leaving the shipper

failure to do so will result in a $200 reduction If the product needs to be worked for any

reason and so just you know you want to read through this and make sure that information like that is relate to your

driver so we'll scroll down and you'll see the rate for this load so this load um is paying uh 1191 to move the freight

I think it's 220 Mi um and then you'll have the you know additional terms and conditions the details and here you'll

see the uh emails and uh numbers for their accounting team so when Once the load is delivered um if your if your

carrier works with a factoring company uh what they'll do is they'll provide this R call information along with the

proof of delivery to the factoring company and the factoring company what they'll do is they'll invoice the broker

um and they have all this information in their systems typically about you know any big

broker they'll have their billing information so they'll just invoice in directly however if your carrier does

not work with a factoring company then this information is going to be pretty important for you um you know this is

the billing information so when it's time to get paid uh your carrier will most likely um have you sent out the

bill of lighting and the invoice along with the proof of delivery to the uh billing department for it to get

processed um but yeah that's the basic uh rate confirmation um I'll go ahead and switch over to another one to kind

of show you what the other one looks like so this is a rate confirmation by CH Robinson it's another pretty big

broker and for CH Robinson you know they'll have the load confirmation number which is load number which um you

know build load load number is as I've mentioned before is the number that you know Brokers use for their own internal

system so it's different than a pickup number a pickup number is a number that's used at a shipper that your

driver must provide so that the shipper knows what Freight to load on the on the trailer so for this one as you can see

it's going to show the load was booked with and then this the broker's information will be listed here and then

the equipment that's required is a van uh your basic uh dimensions for a van here and then this is the customer

requirements so these are um additional information that uh your driver must know about uh

before picking up the load so it says here that you know driver must scale in and out um and then no reefers rails

containers or heated trailers no rollup doors so you want to make sure you know your driver's trailer is um doesn't have

rollup doors um but yeah so some other basic stuff here like no smoking and stuff

like that uh when when the driver's at the shipper and here's the shipper information um this looks like it's a

recycling facility and this is their contact information this is the pickup date and the pickup window seems like

this is not by appointment but rather it's a first come first surf facility so here's the commodity it's

cardboard boxes uh weight is 435 um and this is in Bales so this isn't palletized so the commodity is not

palletized basically it's in Bales um so here's some other instructions for the shipper so again

you want to make sure if there's anything important here that your driver knows but when you're um when you sign

this rate confirmation send it back to the broker you'll also send the rate confirmation to your driver as well so

he'll see all this information but sometimes drivers uh fail to read the special instructions so make sure you

know you communicate that with your drivers so this one for receiver instructions it says must follow strict

safety procedures Etc and for this load looks like it's paying

803 so and this is the submit Freight Bill to and your basic uh information here

terms and conditions Etc so that's the right confirmation for CH Robinson and I'll show you what a rate confirmation

for Nolan Transportation looks like so for them they have you know their load number up here they'll have the carrier

sales rep so this is the broker which you booked load with they're after hour team and then this would be your

carriers information and uh this is how much this load is paying and then you have some additional terms and

conditions and then down here is the pickup and drop information uh looks like this is adhesiv and this is it

weighs at 39,000 a bit over 39,000 uh here are some special in

instructions this one says detention is 3 hours free at the shipper uh so basically meaning uh your driver you

know the shipper has up to 3 hours to load the trailer if it's uh longer than 3 hours that's when your driver starts

to incur detention pay and again we'll talk about detention pay in the future uh

modules so I'll scroll down and this is where you would sign this rate confirmation uh so you would you know if

you have Adobe Acrobat which I highly recommend you'll sign it here you'll uh just type you know your

position you don't necessarily have to you have to type that in here but uh the two most important things is the

signature and the date and um you'll also have your driver's name here and you know you'll

put your driver's cell number Tractor number trailer number uh for this specific broker uh you know we had

emailed all that information to them so that's why we just put the bare minimum here but yeah B this is the basic rate

confirmation and one thing I forgot to mention is as you can see here this one has the signature uh portion here which

you have to sign and send back and if you've noticed these Ray confirmations don't have like a signature uh line and

the reason for that is because these were electronically signed so the broker sent a link to electronically sign them

and once they're electronically signed that's when uh the ray confirmation was obtained fully so that's what a right

confirmation looks like so I hope uh that was very useful for you and if there's any qu uh confusions or

questions just let me know